Another View of Poverty: Spiritual, Material and Institutional

It is important to distinguish "living in poverty" from "being poor". The people of Cuba have a percapita income that is 1/20th of the USA. Yet there is little malnourishment or homelessness in Cuba, and everyone has basic health care. Infant mortality and life expectancy in Cuba are near identical to what they are in the USA. Cuba's community response to severe fuel famine and food shortage in 1990's is inspiring and exemplary.

The Institutions of New Imperialism are located within a square mile of Capitol Hill in Washington DC. Instead of poverty reduction World Bank and IMF policies have fueled social-political turmoil and economic collapse in many developing countries around the World. Ford's empire is bigger than the economy of South Africa. Tiger Woods is paid more for a Nike Commercial than the laborers in Indonesia making Nike products. United States gave money to IMF to fix Russian elections. See the Truth. about WTO

Former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz describes how our common economic accounting procedures and statistics hide and distort the real picture and advocates alternative measures like Green GDP, Median Income, GNP instead of GDP and other measures that reflect the health and well being of people not captured by GDP. Countries like Costa Rica may be quite high in Green GDP. It remains to be seen how the Happiness Index holds up in a traditional monarchy like Bhutan undergoing a voluntary(?) political transition now.

The greatest inability of the human race is to understand the cumulative enslavement effect of usury, exponential growth in debt (exceeding money put in circulation) via compound interest. Take a peek at our credit card industry.

Listen to "All I see is Spiritual Poverty", a song by Bijean

Waking Up from our Affluenza: Mass Consumption and Farmer Suicide

Is there a connection between the two?

US Photographer Chris Jordan talks about the collective impact of individual choices in our consumer culture littering the planet and our habitat with massive waste. But are we choosing? Choice requires reflection. Watch the PBS video, see the last 3 minutes a few times.

One of his images called "Prison Uniforms, 2007" depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. "We have the largest prison population of any country on earth. There's also no other country that has that percentage of its population in jail. And that includes all of the dictatorships that we think of as the enemies of freedom." - Chris jordan

A debt-based, usury based, fractional-reserve based monetary system keeps the system of mindless production and consumption growing exponentially. People lose their freedom of choice. All our media, academia, think tanks, political-economic institutions are feeding this mindless system without realizing it.

An independent citizens tribunal in India finds World Bank's structural adjustment policies promising alleviation of poverty have directly contributing to dislocating the lives and livelihood of millions of farmers and rural households in India, which lost its former self-sufficiency in food production. Between 2001-2007 over 137,000 poor Indian farmers have committed suicide because they cannot afford the increased cost of imported seeds, which require more irrigation water, power, fertilizer and pesticides. Poor farmers with declining access to low interest loans and government subsidies could no longer compete openly with heavily subsidized farming in Europe and the USA. See the two page report here.

Other links: Seeds of suicide: India's desperate farmers, PBS frontline

Canada lost three-quarters of its farmers between 1941 and 1996 and the decline continues. In 1935 there were 6.8 million working farmers in the US; today the number is under 1.9 million - less than the total US prison population. Suicide is now the leading cause of death among US farmers, occurring at a rate three times higher than in the general population. In Britain farmers are taking their own lives at a rate of one a week. In China an estimated 400 million farmers are in danger of losing their livelihoods entirely. Everywhere small-scale farmers are being 'disappeared'. In Australia, one farmer takes his life every fourth day.

Question: Is it possible that our centralized debt-based money system that we collectively participate in contributes to farmer suicide? When our farmers die, who are going to feed us?

60 million Americans on $7 a day : NY Times

The Times article notes that the bottom fifth of all taxpayers average reported income was only $5,743 each. Because the IRS includes a single individual or a married couple in its definition of a “taxpayer” the poorest 26 million taxpayers account for the equivalent nearly 48 million adults and about 12 million dependent children. According to the Times analysis, this means the poorest 60 million Americans have reported incomes of less than $7 a day! It is often noted that 3 billion of the world’s poorest people live on less than $2 a day. In the US, where the cost of living is far higher, $7 a day is only enough to guarantee a life of destitution. The fact that 60 million people live in such dire poverty—and tens of millions more could face the same fate if they lost their jobs or confronted some other financial catastrophe—is a damning indictment of American capitalism and the free market model it touts around the world.

Sources: NY Times Report
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/ineq-d12.shtml
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16760690.htm (McClatchy Report)

The Human Rights Record in the U.S. in 2006

China's report on Human Rights Violations in America

by China's State Council
The U.S. Justice Department reported on Sept. 10, 2006 that there were 5.2 million violent crimes in the United States in 2005, the highest rate in 15 years. The United States has the largest number of privately owned guns in the world.

The United States has the world's largest number of prisoners. According to a report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on Nov. 30, 2006, by the end of 2005, nearly 2.2 million inmates were held in state and federal prisons or country and municipal jails. The adult U.S. correctional population, including those on probation or parole, reached a high of more than Seven million men and women for the first time. About three percent of the U.S. adult population, or one in every 32 adults, were in the nation's prisons and jails or on probation or parole. A report, issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on Sept. 7, 2006, said that more than half of the inmates in U.S. prisons suffered from mental problems.

The Americans in poverty constitute the “Third World” of U.S. society. A report released by the U.S. Census Bureau on August. 29,2006 said there were 37 million people living in poverty in 2005, accounting for 12.6 percent of total U.S. population. The report also said there were 7.7 million families in poverty and one out of eight Americans was living in poverty in 2005. The poverty rates of Cleveland and Detroit were as high as 32.4 percent and 31.4 percent respectively and nearly one out of three was living under the poverty line.

There are 600,000 or so homeless people nationwide, including 16,000 homeless in Washington D.C. and 3,800 in New York City, and 88,345 in LA area.

The United States lags behind most countries in legal protection for labor and family-friendly policies in the workplace. The Voice of America reported on Feb. 4,2007 that a study of 173 countries with high, middle and low income jointly conducted by Harvard University and McGill University found the United States is one of the only five countries that do not guarantee some form of paid maternity leave, the other four countries being Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea

Unequal Access

According to U.S. Census Bureau's 2005 data, in the United States more than half ethnic minority males dropped school before high school graduation, 67.5 percent Hispanics and 53 percent blacks got no further education after graduating from high school. White Americans were more likely to hold a graduate or professional degree. At least 30 percent white adults held a bachelor's degree, compared with 17 percent black adults and 12 percent Hispanic adults.

According to a report released by the Human Rights Watch on Dec. 1, 2006, the number of black inmates was 6.6 times that of whites and the number of Latino inmates was 2.5 times that of white inmates. Statistics showed that about one out of 12 black men were in jail or prison, compared with one in 100 white men. Researchers pointed to poverty, a lack of opportunities, racism in the criminal justice system for the black-white prison gap 12.9 million children under 18 lived below the poverty line by the end of 2005 and 8.3 million children uninsured.

Psychological Stress and Health

Each year in the U.S., thousands of teenagers commit suicide. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for 15-to-24-year-olds. Over sixty-percent of teens who kill themselves use guns.No doubt, China has its own share of problems with human right violation.

Stress is linked to the six leading causes of death: heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicide.^{1 -} Canadian Mental Health Asso

Financial and Job Stress

The leading cause of stress poll by LifeCare cites 1) finance, and 2) job and careers as primary causes of employee stress. The poll was open to employees of LifeCare's 1,500 client companies nationwide via its web site, http://www.lifecare.com/, during the month of April, 2005.

The human costs of outsourcing, offshoring and downsizing manufacturing, high-tech and high skill jobs from developed to developing countries are being increasingly felt everywhere. Having one or two dominant world currency for international trade and Third-world debt may not be a good idea after all!

And what all the above economic, social, mental health dysfunctions got to do with enlightened capitalism or changing the macro system from inside out??? Hmm…may be a whole lot and more.